Elite Women in Ascendancy Ireland, 1690–1745: Imitation and Innovation by Rachel Wilson (review)

In 1707, Juliana, dowager countess of Burlington and guardian of her son's estate, was asked by an Irish curate to support repairs to a church in Tallow, County Waterford. The church's roof had been partially blown off in a storm, and the curate turned to her because of her family's long ties to the area; her son's great-grandfather, the Earl of Cork, had worshiped there. Juliana grudgingly agreed to cover some of the costs but not enough to pay for both the demolition and rebuilding that were needed. Yet only a year later she spent a considerable sum of money to repair and beautify a church on her son's English estate. These two decisions nicely exemplify the peculiarities of both the Irish elite and Ms. Wilson's book, which seeks to emphasize the distinguishing characteristics of Irish elite women while consistently demonstrating the ways in which those women identified with their English counterparts. Juliana's role as a central figure in this book also points to an even greater oddity, since she was herself an Englishwoman who never set foot in Ireland.

The lives of elite British women during the long eighteenth century have by now been extensively studied. Ms. Wilson seeks to identify areas of comparison and contrast with Irish women's counterparts in England and Scotland, who have received considerably more attention from historians. Focusing on the decades following the Revolution, when Ireland's economy was suffering, its political system was in flux, and Catholics were systematically deprived of economic and political power, Ms. Wilson argues that this period saw the establishment of a unique role for elite Irish women. The book moves outward from family and the home to sociability, politics, and finally "institutional philanthropy." Ms. Wilson relies for her evidence primarily on five families for whom extensive documentation survives. Appendices provide family trees for each, which helps the reader keep track of the complex networks and multiple titles involved; brief summaries of each family's history also appear in the introduction. These families spanned a broad range in terms of both rank and fortune; Ms. Wilson acknowledges that she conceives of elite status "quite liberally," relying on an unspecified "baseline in terms of income and status." This decision is understandable: intermarriage, political engagement, and sociability all enabled a broad elite to mingle and participate in many of the same activities.

More problematic is the equally liberal conception of what it meant to be Irish. Many of the women who are the subjects of this study spent relatively little time in Ireland; one, as we have noted, "never visited at all." While Ms. Wilson argues that Irish women's experiences were distinct from their counterparts in England and Scotland, this case is hard to make when she relies so heavily on women who spent much of their lives outside Ireland.

Details throughout the book, however, support her view. She notes the strong tendency toward endogamous marriage, observing that "even the most cosmopolitan families were deceptively provincial." Irish families married into other Irish families, with a relatively small pool of potential mates who shared similar rank and fortune. Similarly, she addresses the impact of the post-Revolutionary years on elite sociability in Ireland, with the emergence of a "new Ascendancy elite, … blending together those with rank and the newly moneyed commoners who had risen to prominence in the wake of the Glorious Revolution." The absence of regular parliaments and a royal court further distinguished Irish from English sociability, especially as it intersected with politics. Ms. Wilson notes that while the same key families participated in court politics over years in England, "in Ireland, the ground was constantly shifting beneath women's feet, as its political leaders changed, arrived and left. This prevented the acquisition and implementation of the kind of influence wielded at the English court by female favourites or quickly nullified it."

Yet the political roles played by...